ClearTax, an income tax returns e-filing website, has raised $1.3 million in funding from PayPal co-founder Max Levchin, Scott & Cyan Banister, WhatsApp’s Business Head Neeraj Arora, AngelList Founder & CEO Naval Ravikant and Dropbox VP Ruchi Sanghvi among others, reports The Tech Portal.
The startup will use the funds for launching new products, expanding the team size, and building a mobile strategy. The company mentions that it will focus on introducing invoicing and payroll features, and launch the mobile app by next month.
Founded in 2011 by Archit Gupta, Raja Ram Gupta, Srivatsan Chari and Ankit Solanki, ClearTax is an online service which allows users to file tax returns and was one of the startups selected for Y Combinator’s accelerator programme in June 2014. In July 2013, ClearTax had entered into a partnership with Paytm to offer free tax filing to Paytm users.
The platform currently lets users upload Form-16 in the form of a pdf to file income tax returns in India. Users can download pdf previews of their IT returns to review, and then e-file it to send it to the income tax department. ClearTax also offers tax filings for freelancers and consultants for which it charges Rs 3,700 to Rs 12,000 for tiered plans with different features, and an NRI plan priced at Rs 3,100.
ClearTDS launch: Last month ClearTax launched ClearTDS to help enterprises and companies file TDS returns and generate form 16s. The platform helps identify late deductions in TDS returns as well as carries out PAN verification for all deductees. The platform is currently available for free and claims to have clients like Tech Mahindra, ICICI Bank, Cyient and Converges.
Recent hires: ClearTax recently hired Prashant Nair as vice president of engineering and head of product and technology group and Aakash Bapna and Jai Santosh as senior software engineers. Nair was previously the director of engineering at Flipkart, before which he was the CTO and co-founder of AheadYou. ClearTax currently has a team of 55 which it plans to expand to 205 by the end of May this year.
